Step by Step/Issue 47
This is Issue #47 of ''Step by Step''. This the fifth issue of Volume Eight. Passover He never fell asleep. The night, freakishly wild, was too alive. Lyle Jackson, the fallen father, the broken gangster, the streetwalker, he was awake. Full of guilt, full of nonsense, Nolan'd say. The night, boiling his blood, cooking him greatly, had died, and it had left Lyle Jackson looking at the new day's first light at the crack of dawn a little ways past five o'clock. He seemed nice, Lyle remembered saying the day that he'd met Dennis for the first time. Outside a diner, right by where Nolan worked repairing cars and the such. "He prob'ly smelled you and got the hell out of here," Lyle'd said. "You might be right," Nolan had replied, his face creasing and his forehead wrinkling up as he smeared it and his golden brown hair back with grease. "Or he smelled you." "Why me?" Nolan had laughed. "Man, you smell like a bitch." Now, Lyle Jackson was lying down on the mattress still. He came to with the cold consuming his face and to the crackle of the nearby truck fire. Clutched in his hands was the bag of cereal, empty now, having left his mouth dry. His lips were stuck together and his tongue was swollen from thirst. There was a stabbing pain in his lungs. He looked himself over, finding himself covered in blood. Burnt clothes, smelling like ass. He rolled over off the mattress, taking in a deep breath. After trying to stand up, his right knee buckled underneath him and he fell back down. He put his head on his bent knee. His shoes were dirty, he noticed. Needed new clothes, that's for sure. He breathed in. Again, he breathed in. The second breath was like sandpaper being dragged between his lungs. Lyle's head went dizzy, then he got up suddenly, and succeeded on wobbly legs. He looked around the room, turning slowly and suspiciously. "I smell like a bitch?" Heavily breathing, Lyle moved through the room, scrounging around, foraging like an animal whatever he could use. Thinking, thinking, thinking. With each second that passed, Lyle just begged more and more that he'd find something—then he did. He came across a little basket in the corner of the room with a pair of socks sticking out of it. He looked inside, found more clothes, and undressed himself. Put on the socks. Dusted off his fine leather shoes. Put on a black shirt. A nice pair of jeans. Looking deeper, he found a nice Cuban fedora made out of straw. He put it on. Better than nothing. Lyle put his hand on his chest, felt the bloodied bandage on it still, and shivered all throughout himself. No more Brock. Lyle took Blaine's fat revolver in his right hand. No more high school. No more Carter, too. Drink up, the wind howled outside in the cold. The blood pounded his ears. No more crazed people, long dead yet alive. The dead walking. He motioned towards the exit door with a rough limp. The walking dead—where had they gone to? They were so far away. So silent. Out of sight. Lyle reached the door, pushed it open as it had previously been, and walked out, gun at his side. Christ, his skin was trembling with fright. Out of the room walked the killer of many men, the hairs on his neck upright with paranoia, his feet working down the stairs along the wall with thick caution. The alley was pretty dead, as it had last been. As if all the town's souls had passed on, passed over and away. Leaving a ghost town. The streets were empty now. About twenty minutes had passed. The truck fire had grown into a beast, feasting on the air greedily with the crackle of a mad witch. "Show yourselves," Lyle said coolly, infuriated. Lyle looked, saw the Dumpster, and his feet led him into the street, and spilled himself out onto the street, gasping in awe of the truck's brazen fire. Frightening in sight, and haunting was the smoke which loomed above him the fire. He was no longer breathing normally, for the fright had him, causing him to quiver his grip on the revolver. Everybody was gone, all those hundreds of people. Off going on the hunt. Lyle looked upwards, seeing the night sky decomposing upon death into an array of sunshine and bright colors, vividly purple. No red sky this time, tonight—there was no such thing. "Victory, victory," said somebody. "Ain't that sweet!" "Oh hot damn," said a voice, that of Deputy Blaine's. "You're right about that, Ray." Lyle's heart stopped. He shut up, shut up all his thoughts. These strangers—these criminals were after him, he knew that too damn well, and so he hid himself behind a wall by the exit of the alleyway. "That man had the balls of a goat, if you ask me." "He was dangerous, if you's ask me." Behind Lyle, in the alleyway of darkness, came a gang of two. All suddenly seemed hopeless for Lyle. Officer Ray Cameron came walking through the alleyway grinning madly to himself. There was a wooden rifle in his hands, held upright on his left shoulder, high up in the sky with a sharp monster of a bayonet blade. "You saw it," said Deputy Blaine. "Damn, he just kept coming." "It was surreal." "We did him a favor." "How so?" "You saw how burnt his face was. His legs." "Was he that badly burnt?" "He looked like a hot damn." "Damn—speaking of which, that's what he said before he came out of the truck." "Screaming that he was a hot damn?" Blaine laughed. Ray laughed too—and off in the distance, Lyle had lifted up a big fat revolver to his chest, whispering down her barrel. He had not much to lose, Lyle Jackson. Well, he had always imagined going out like a cowboy. A superhero. Someone who would leave behind a legacy. Lyle knew that he was none of that, but sure, it was a pleasant thought for a man whose life rested upon a big fat revolver. "That friend of his," said Blaine, chuckling ever so lightly. "You know, he took my gun." "Your heater, the one you're always swinging around like a big, fat—?" "Yeah. That's the one." "Good riddance." "Come on," Blaine said, an innocence overtaking his voice. "If he uses that gun, somebody's gonna die. He's armed. He didn't die in that fire." "The Band'll find him." "I don't think so." "They always find them." "That spy, that traitor, Tom Gallenger was his name?" "That's it," said Ray Cameron, and he suddenly stopped in the middle of the alley, at the belly of the dark snake. "Tommy-boy was what we used to call him. Not before he died, no, when we thought he was with us. One of us, I mean." "One of us?" "A citizen here. Somebody who'd moved into town looking for a new life." "My ass, he was looking for a new life." Deputy Blaine then stopped to scoff and turned to face his fellow member of the Band, the coffee-brown skinned man who they called Ray Cameron, a man who had beat him at chess several times over and had killed all the muscles in his arm after weeks of arm wrestling each other. "Tommy was a traitor," said Ray. "Plain and simple, which, funnily enough is why he's dead now. With his friends." "All four of them, I heard?" "Tom died once that ax crashed into his thick skull," continued Ray. "As the story goes, Nolan and Lyle Jackson, the Whacko friend of his, then came over to the morgue with the body. And you know who was there to accept that body?" "Nobody's ever told me." "Right." "Was it Tom's friend?" Ray Cameron laughed and his rifle bounced up and down, the bayonet's shadow stabbing the wall and burning into Lyle Jackson's eyes as he watched from afar. He was much like Ray, both tall and quite lanky, both with the round voices, and both were black like the livers from two alcoholics. But the threatening letter didn't make sense, why would Rockefeller himself be a part of a rebellion? The Anarchist revolutionary flag, was that it? A rebellion, something like a grounds for divorce from everything else, outside of town? Both men were a part of the rebellion. The masses of hundreds who had celebrated execution moments before were a part of the rebellion. If that were true, there was no one to deny that the town itself was the rebellion, a rebellion from the unseen. There was a nice memory in Lyle's head then. A coldness on his face, a hotness over his eyebrow where a fresh cut had blossomed with blood, and so he was in the mayor's office. There he stood, lo, the Grinning Samuel from the past. A meeting with Rockefeller, the man behind the madness, the organized madness which he had given birth to just the night before with Carter Jameson's diseased hands. "You did good, Jacky," Donovan Smith had said, for he stood by his brother's desk. Lyle Jackson hadn't said a thing in return. A thanks was not warranted spending the day breathing air as a murderer. "Excellent," said the brother, the mayor. "You're welcome," Lyle had said. "You're very welcome." Lyle Jackson now found himself in the harsh cold of a new Indiana day. Somewhere in the town of Smith's Ferry, a land of killers, which to him had shown no love, but only the love of murder. Some sort of ache tugged at Lyle's lungs, then, and encouraged him to cry out to the Band, in pain, call it all off for the sake of a nice, stinking cigarette. He could taste it now, for now his nose was full with the aroma of burning gasoline, thick with tobacco skin. Sometimes, more often than not on the weekends, he would be the kind of gentleman that hung on porches, smoking the occasional Marlboro. Under the Indiana sun, they got good sun there, the young Jackson boy would spend his mornings there, smoking the good smoke. Now, yeah, the noon would end and he'd end up at whichever job he had gotten to be the owner of then. Could always smoke there, thought Lyle, behind some closed doors. And there'd be no shortage of those. Alone time with the hot Marlboro, become the Marlboro man. Away, far away from the street's coldness. "And you'd have thought that they'd show some decency," said Ray Cameron, stopping dead to laugh in place. "Was it him, Tom's friend?" "The bunch of them." "Really?" "Working the night-shift, really." "Hot damn." “Damn straight,” Ray said, without hesitation. The big fat revolver quivered once more in Lyle's hands, for he had witnessed the scene himself with Nolan and he hauling the bloodied corpse of Tom Gallenger to the funeral home. The three workers, each of different ages and ranks, had only been recruited by the Beekman family within the last couple of months before then. During that time, the three of them, along with Gallenger, had become members of the town, newcomers to the cause herself. Just then, before the day that Tom met his demise by an axe, they had become nightshifters, a fine name which the mayor Rockefeller himself had given to the invasion of the jobless into the town. Nightshifters, those who had come to Rockefeller. The year had been two-thousand and eight. And, now, Rockefeller was a watchful man, a hunter with eye on all. At first, of course, he had inherited no suspicion from the five newcomers, led by the bulk of a man Tom Gallenger. The man walked with an accent to his voice, something that smelled like a Kentucky drawl. He'd been no city slicker. Funnily, Tom had mentioned his taste for Cuban cigars around Red Smith once. He was no communist. There was no puzzle to piece together about the man, so Rockefeller, as Lyle had been told, had turned to the new workers at the morgue. Each had accents from the depths of New England, Red had reckoned. To Rockefeller, and to Donovan, the town's cause relied upon whoever raised it up from the ground. The creeds, say, the beliefs and various backgrounds of all men adopted the cause would have to be taken into account. At night, at the darkest of hours, there were lines which simply had to be crossed during such investigations. The September of last year had been witness to that, for the Smith family had discovered dirt on the new nightshifters at the morgue, which tied them to Tom Gallenger, the dirtiest swine of them all. As Lyle had been told, the crew of five had planned to terrorize the town of Smith's Ferry. From within, through arson and drug-dealing, as menaces of society. In one day alone, at that morgue, the Gallenger man and his friends had been uprooted from their ground and massacred on the spot. Lyle asked himself now if he thought he was dying. The revolver looked him in the eyes. His father had been a soldier many years before. The barrel of the gun whispered at the Jackson boy now, speaking to the boy still within him, a silent part of him. His grandfather and his grandmother had been the owners of a farmhouse. Lyle now kissed the barrel again. Before him, before them, his family had been runaway slaves from down south. He grew tired of thinking and left his hiding spot, walking further down the sidewalk and into the street, his head shaking, and he walked further into the street. His heart slowed down and a relaxation came upon him. It felt nice out. Something about the new morning. Lyle looked around, for the truck was still there. In the morning's sunny cold. He found himself as a witness to the town, a fly in the morning wind. He looked upwards and, with his eyes heavy, he spotted a couple of flags hanging from the windows of nearby businesses and apartments. In the distance, the sun hit him like a bullet. A stray cloud bravely covered up the sky. Move on, a raspy voice from the big fat revolver told him. Lyle Jackson made it to the other side of the street before starting to breath heavily. He sensed somebody behind him. A kind of fear rose in his heart. Lyle Jackson remembered his first night as a fallen father, without his daughter and his friend, her nice mother. He'd been arrested that night. Robbery, with intent to eat. He had been caught outside the Domino's pizzeria, in the alley right by it, with his hands pawing crazily at the pizza that was inside. About five minutes had passed before the first police officer had found him. The man had asked him if the pizza had tasted good. Lyle had laughed back, expecting the officer to tell him that they served no pizza at the county jail. "It's early morning," said Lyle Jackson, clutching his abdomen, in much pain. "Never liked 'em," said a boy's voice behind him. "I do," said Lyle. "Great time for a chat. For a Marlboro." An early morning bird cawed in the distance. The voice'd come from Jack Wallace, a boy with rough black hair who spent most nights at the drugstore with a gang of friends. The bird cawed once more. The boy was about the same height as Lyle and he was the skinniest of the gang, but not the dumbest. Lyle knew from past conversations that Jack liked sleeping in late, waking up at a little before noon, taking a shit on his friend's backyard, and then drinking a bottle of cognac or two. "You still smoke?" "I do," Lyle said. "When's the last time you's drunken whiskey?" "Give or take a couple years." "I got some right here," said Jack Wallace. "Turn around and I'll give you some, sir." "Sir?" "Yessir." "I thought I'd told you to stop calling me that." "I forgot." "How could you forget, now?" Lyle Jackson said, coiling his fingers around the revolver once more. He laughed a little. "That was the night I left town." "With Nolan." "After your friend Cleon started callin' him names," said Lyle. "Things had gotten a little too hot that day." "I understand, man," said Jack. "The murders, I know. It's been more than a year, Jacky." "And I shook that hand of yours afterwards, leaving town," said Lyle. "The same one that might be holding a gun. I ain't turning around now." "Please, Jacky." "I miss the days when a man named Rockefeller didn't have to hire two friends to kill another man. Couldn't he have done it himself, without help, your friend's uncle—Rockefeller?" "What's that?" "Those were the days," said Lyle, sighing. "And without trying to justify the deaths to the two friends, y'know, by saying that the men they were gonna brutalize were bad people." "I know he lied to you." "He told us that Tom and his friends were a bunch of damn criminals." "They weren't," said Jack, moving closer towards him. "The man than Nolan got was some kind of agent." "An agent?" Lyle Jackson scoffed harshly. "Tom was an agent, of what kind?" "The FBI. His friends, too." "You're telling me this because you got a gun pointed at me, right?" "No," Jack said, stopping within five feet from Lyle. "No such thing as a gun in my hand, we're friends, you and me. You deserve to know." "Why now, why after Dennis?" "Because the dead are alive, Jacky," said the boy, "and the world's coming to an end. And now that you're here?" "We were evacuated to the closest town." "And with the Band after your ass?" "I ain't got much time left, you suppose?" "I suppose so." Lyle Jackson decided to turn around right then and he saw his little friend for the first time in over a year. He wore a velvet shirt with jeans. The teenager hadn't had much of a change. His face was slightly round with a little crook to his nose. His braces had been taken off his teeth. The bird cawed once more and Lyle saw, in the day's new light, a scar running down Jack Wallace's face which had whitened with time into a thick bulge. "Did Carter really kill Wayne?" "It ain't a lie," said Jack. "If you's talking about the psycho, awye. Three shots to the chest." Lyle looked away. "He was trying to kill us. Cleon's uncle was trying to kill us." "Rockefeller told him to do it." "No money was exchanged?" "Not that I know of," said Jack. "I'm so sorry, Jacky. So sorry about your friends. Cleon's uncle's planning on covering it up. Saying that you all are bandits, something like that." "For all them deaths?" "And for his brother's death," Jack Wallace said. "Yeah, Cleon's mad, badly. He shot the crazy man really good, told me all about it how the flesh got torn off by the bullets and spit through the air." Lyle Jackson sighed painfully, clutching his belly, just under his ribs. "Donovan's dead now. And I'm a dead man walking 'cause of that. And I know all of this, it ain't your fault. I know what those Smiths mean to you." "I'm really sorry it had to be like this." "The flags—is Rockefeller involved?" Jack Wallace shut himself up and hesitated. "The bringer of dawn is watching." "A year ago, I thought all this talk about a band was about some chorus club." "We're revolutionaries, Jacky. And I'm not ashamed." "You're kiddin' me?" "I'm telling you the truth." "I'm just a stupid nigger," Lyle said to himself and limped past Jack, down the sidewalk. It was a voice unheard of before, one of flabbergastment. Jack could tell that he believed his words to be true, that Rockefeller was leading a rebellion. Lyle did not say, he showed. "Stupid ones like me end up dead, boy. I don't need any truth from the likes of you." "Please, Jacky. You've got to hide. Get out of here." "A bunch of revolutionaries—" Lyle laughed, his chest filling with laughter that eased his aching. "Thanks for the laugh, though." "Jacky, you don't understand. I don't even know if I'm dreaming or not." "The dead are walking outta their graves," Lyle Jackson said, reaching a turn to the right on the sidewalk that led into another alleyway. "And then you got all this madness. You know what, man?" "What?" "You can go to hell. Take your damn friends along, yeah." Lyle Jackson limped into the alley and Jack Wallace followed him to it. "You idiots used me." "It's not like that—" "Shut up and let me die in peace." "I'm leaving, all right?" "Gonna take a seat in this alley and die," said Lyle. "The Band's gonna come and you better hide yourself." "I might as well." "You don't want Cleon's uncle to get you," Jack mumbled. "He'll make you suffer." "You got anything to lose, Wallace?" Lyle faced his friend once, pointed the gun at him, and made a false shot with it. "Anything at all, that this trouble you've gotten into'll take away?" "Nothing, nothing at all." Lyle smiled, his teeth visibly red with blood in the light. He turned around and continued walking away. "I won't tell them anything," said Jack. "You might as well," Lyle said, laughing so hard that he missed a step and crashed into the wall. Like a shadow, he crept along the wall and hauled himself deeper into the alley. Move on, the revolver told him. He kept moving forward, cackling to himself at the thought of all this madness, what a nightmare it was. He lightly calmed himself, said a prayer for himself, straightened himself out and walked upright. Lyle didn't know much about communists except that they were a worse breed than columnists. He turned around to tell Jack Wallace the joke, with a nice grin on his face for a dead man walking in the undead world, and saw that nobody was there. Jack Wallace was gone. Dark was the night, and bright appeared the dawn. There he stood, Lyle Jackson, for he was a man of a lifespan's worth of reputation, for he was a man blessed with high visions of gradeur, and of which had led him here to this sidewalk. To the town of the sinful Smiths. Lyle gulped, for they were to be his executioners. Move on, spoke the fat revolver. Red Smith was alive and well. The dead were alive and well. Red Smith was a staging a be-all end-all revolution. He was leading a covert, bloody rebellion against the country. Red Smith was Rockefeller. Rockefeller was the bringer of—Lyle breathed in hoarsely—was the bringer of dawn truly watching? With the morning sun moments away, Lyle glanced around until he came upon the sight of a decayed building the block ahead. It was sorely welcoming to his eyes. ---- Nearby, in the town. Closer. The tomb of Corporal Carter Jameson, the ill-fated man with visions of higher power, now stricken down by the hand of disease which he had fought to defend against. In under a fortnight, the man had become a stranger, even to himself, which had been some sort of uncivilized beast, unknown to his senses. As the morning sun rose over the town of Smith's Ferry, the corpse of a once admirable soldier and officer of his country laid still, unmoving on a mortician's table for he had died with a secret that had favored the devil in him. The funeral home was decayed, but it was well-kept for a decayed building. It belonged to the Beekman family, which in simpler terms, was more like a corporation set across a couple of states, held together under a common history. That early morning, while Red Smith sat at a table full of paperwork in the mortician's office, he recalled what he knew of the Beekman family. His tongue burned and his heart thumped against his chest like an ass rash. Followers, Red thought of the Beekman family. His own father, Whittaker Smith, while though he was a poor man with farmland to care for, he had established ties, thick ones, with the Beekmans throughout his life. The patriarch Smith had taught each of his sons, as his father had taught him, that life was the cow of many. Red Smith laughed now, sitting at his desk. Nights at the Smith farmhouse, Red recalled, were full of lessons. He now felt the memories warming up in his head. Full moon outside, hanging low in the sky. Out on the porch, with his father and brother Don. They were there, standing on the porch with the lights on, eating ice cream, laughing. A couple of scarecrows stood around the cornfield by the house. One of them was ogling the young Red Smith and the boy couldn't help but look back at it, for the scarecrow was a menacing one. "You've wet your pants, haven't you?" said Don. Red Smith had grimaced at his brother. "You'd like that, wouldn't you?" he had said. "The bobcat freaked you out, huh?" "It wasn't no bobcat." Whittaker Smith had been glaring at his two boys. "The Springer ranch'll pay me good money for the bobcat," he had said, and Red Smith remembered his father pointing at the dead animal at the head of porchsteps. "The cow of many, right dad?" Don had said. "Life's well-milked," had said Red in return. "And badly fed." "Right," the farmer Whittaker had declared, grinning out with his tobbaco teeth. "Life's just like that, some sort of cow for all folks—rednecks, niggers, all of them." That night, stubbornly, after the bobcat's attack, the youthful Red Smith'd become a sickle-boy. Over the months that followed, with time, the patriarch Smith had taken to leading his boys out onto the same porch in order to teach them the ways. Their father would teach them how society would treat them, in the world ruled by the Man. A world in which his sons wouldn't survive without the ways of the sickle and of the hammer. Red breathed in now in the mortician's office and said, "I feel like new." "And after such a long night," said Gary Beekman, "I feel like a prostitute." "Interesting," said his boss. "Hold on," said the other officer in the room, Drake Wilson. "Does that mean you feel like a prostitute, or you want one?" "Beats me," Gary said. Red Smith chuckled with that fine grin of his, took out a cigar from his pocket, and proceeded to burn it. He got up from the table, holding some sort of fat burlap sack in his hands, and spilled out its insides over the table. Hundreds of dollars fell out and he chuckled. "Blood money, for the taking." "What a sight," said Drake, walking over to the table. "What a sight." "This goes to all of the Band," clarified Red, throwing the burlap sack onto the table as he pulled warmly on the cigar. He was a man all about money, dirty money. Most days, he regretted ever coming to such a low, but there was some things that simply had to be done. He snickered, an uncaught mastermind he was. Over the years, and with glee, Red Smith had overseen dozens upon dozens of truckloads of the good stuff working its way in and out of town, to the big cities. Red was smart, but he couldn't have done it without help from under the border. Red Smith enlightened himself with another breath of air, pulling tightly on the cigar again, rubbing his chest. Too much stress. He exhaled. It had to be done. Just that death of one of Jackson's friends had gotten him relieved. At the moment, he felt indifferent towards Carter, particularly he felt interested about the man's disease, for he had visibly been sick. Perhaps Carter hadn't been crazy a month before. Red smelled his cigar and chuckled, pointing it at the two officers. "Was it that bite that did him in?" he asked them about Carter. "You saw his face," said Drake. "He was more dead than alive." There was the thud of a hard-knuckle on the door behind where Officer Gary Beekman stood. Red Smith looked up and saw the man, a big bear of a man, jump in fright. The mayor chuckled lightly and smoked again, knowing Gary as the funny man that he was. Gary smiled lightly, and opened the door behind him, saying, "Still gives me the chills." "My hairs are still standin' up," said the uniformed man wearing bloodied plastic scrubs who walked into the office. The man was the parlor's mortician himself, Bram, who was a little bit more literate than his older brother Gary about the handling of corpses. He was a big smiler, always smiling, and Red Smith knew that behind that smile was a ghost of a man, mysterious to Red's eyes, a skinny phantom of a sort. "What'd you find on him?" Red asked him. Bram Beekman pursed his lips. "How about you read the final report, all of it?" Gary shot him a look. His brother knew better than to confront the boss. "Tell the man, bro." "You like the details," said Bram. "That's fine. But, Jameson was totally not fine." "Really?" said Red. "He was pretty dead, deader than my left nipple." "That's all?" "That's all." "Don't be stubborn with me, scalawag." "Wayne's freshly killed," Bram continued. "Three shots to the chest, blood loss. He probably would've lived for a couple more decades, and your brother?" "I saw him already." "The bullet hit him right in the heart, fair and square." "He died for the cause," Drake quipped. "The great one," Red Smith said, bringing the cigar to his lips once more. "Jameson told me he'd been bitten, at the school." "Wait, he was one of those things?" Gary asked. "There are none of them here," said Drake. "Either way," Bram said, sighing. "I found boils all over his face, his chest. Rockefeller, do you like those details?" "Continue." "I discovered a series of fine boils in his ears," said the mortician. "I also uncovered, what I trusted to be, a rash around his arms. The rash was deepest near the bite wound—you could tell by the teeth marks." "I imagine that it was quite painful." "—Jameson had inflammation of the skin, of the flesh. Something was off about his lungs, the way that they felt. His blood was thick on my gloves. His throat, oh, his throat was such a swollen mess. And his stomach?" "You mean, what's left of his belly?" "What was inside of it, I salvaged it good. You know, I found a couple of pounds of flesh inside of it. And a piece of fabric." "What does that mean, bro?" asked Gary. Bram Beekman laughed. "You've seen the damn news, and by God, you all know as well as me, and I'm his coroner, that he was infected. How was he still alive, somewhat conscious in the brain, I don't know." "You'll need to do more tests," said Red. "Why should we waste the time, Rockefeller?" asked Drake. "We've got people out there, threats to the cause." "Our cause," said Gary. Red Smith swallowed a lump in his throat. "To find out what was wrong with him. The dead are up and walking, that's why." "He's right," Bram said. "We've got no absolute idea what's happening out there, in the world beyond." "Say, y'all can do what you please," Gary blurted, beating his chest with one fist before placing it on Drake's shoulder. "We'll assemble the Band, yeah, while the morning's young." "You'll do no such thing," said Red, smoking the cigar thickly as he loaded the money on the desk back into the burlap sack. "You may help me pay the boys for what they accomplished over the night, however." "We will," Drake said, blankly looking at the bag. Red Smith tossed it at him and he broke his stare, becoming upright after catching the full bag of money. He knew how much the cause meant to Rockefeller and, upon that thought, smiled. "Let's get out of here," he told Gary. "And I'll go put Jameson together," Bram said. His forehead was creased and his eyes were small little dots looking at the mayor, now acting like fingernails scratching at Red Smith's soul. "I strapped him down on the table, you know." "Strapped him down, bro?" Gary asked. "How's that?" said Red. "I had to," said Bram. "For my safety, and welfare, I had that thought that he might've woken up, as one of those crazy things." "You said that the bullets did away with him." "I never said that," Bram said. "It's obvious that he was shot to death, but, no. I think what truly was killing him was the bite. You say he acted strange, right?" "Rage. Was full of rage," said Drake. "Perhaps it was that bite of his," Red Smith said, "and that's what made him all crazy. Are you saying that the bite, which he got days or so ago, was turning him mad?" "I believe so," Bram said. "And that he'd gone up and mad by the time that, excuse me, you ''enlisted him last night." "Don't mention my brother again." "I didn't?" said Bram Beekman. "Well," Drake said, himself now sensing unease in the room. "Good-bye, Rockefeller." "Yeah," Gary said, waving for his own brother. "Let's go." Red Smith waved them off and continued staring at Bram as the two left the office. At that moment, he realized something about Bram Beekman, the great-something grandson of the family patriarch who had gotten millions in cash money from catering warmly to those who'd passed away. He saw the bobcat, a threat in Bram, slowing which was coming to the surface of his skin. Red Smith laughed, pulling once more on his cigar. "I've always liked you, Bram." "I liked your brother a whole bunch." "So did I. Now he's out of the picture." "His faith in the cause, it was weaker than most, wasn't it?" "Weaker than my lungs now," Red chuckled, coughing on the smoke. "But, that's why you're my threat, Bram. Lied to your brother and Wilson who calls you a fine gentleman, just now. Got them thinking bad about you, and you like that." "All for the cause." Red Smith smiled a wide grin. "Your brother'll be avenged," said Bram. "He will be avenged." "He will," repeated Red. "Will you avenge him?" "We will avenge him." "He will," said Red Smith once more. "But will ''you avenge him?" "I will." "Again," Red Smith said. He then looked down at all of the paperwork on the office desk which he sat at. The smile, what remained of it, died on his face. Carter Jameson's papers laid before him, all of which he would have to go over with himself, in order to root out all of what the man Jameson had experienced, been witness to as Jackson had been. "Again, Bram, I think you're a threat." "Why's that?" Bram said, smiling with his plastic-covered arms folded on his chest. "Have you ever thought of, hell, being my lieutenant?" "Your lieutenant?" Bram Beekman said, smiling sinisterly. "I might not qualify." "You might have a harder, stronger faith in my cause than me." Bram Beekman laughed. Red Smith laughed as well—he knew that the Beekman family were about as Red as they came. ---- Outside now. A little further. Outside in the morning light, there came the sun over the horizon. It offered little to the town, not much of a savior to those struggling through the fight on the inside. The sky did look beautiful then. The cold had lessened from last night, remained in the town yet, an invisible fog in the town, gutted which it was by a bunch of separatists. The town of Smith's Ferry was a small town, a piece to the puzzle which connected it to a long stretch of road which, going through neighborhood after neighborhood, connected it to the city, now the forsaken one, of Indianapolis. The man Red Smith, the star-crossed leader of the town, gazed long and hard at the world beyond from a window in the funeral parlor. There was a great fence, put up to stand brightly by the town's old military occupants several weeks beforehand, and now it stood as a reminder. Red Smith blinked. He knew that his town was safe. A lot of miles of road separated the town from the nearest one. Earlier that day, right before his nephew did away with one of Jacky's friends, Red Smith had made sure to check the motel. He frowned now. The officer that they'd sent to find them, a boy ripe from the town's band, had found nobody at the motel, none of Jacky's friends from the school. Red smiled somewhat, having had assumed that the sergeant Malcolm Grant had phoned him from the motel, so the Summercreek people hadn't gone too far from the motel. They were very dangerous people, and for the town's welfare, they needed to be ridden of. "Say, I do like successful nights," said Gary Beekman, who stood tall about five feet behind him with the sulking Drake Wilson. "Rockefeller, and you?" "Last night, you know, wasn't that much of a successful one." "How so?" "Only one of ours died," remarked Sheriff Wilson, eyeing at the back of his boss's head, noticing his ears twitch at the mention of his late brother. "Three of the others, too." "Lyle Jackson is dead," said the Sheriff. "The damn Smith kid shot him, right in the belly. He's dead." "Unless he's a ghost, say." Behind them, there walked the mortician Bram Beekman. The room was quite big and located in the back of the funeral home where the bodies of the deceased were cared for. The new light broke over the secured fence and through the window of the funeral home. Something of that brought a chill to Bram's spine. It wasn't too cold for the new morning. It was his nature, the skinny kid's nature of getting chills down his spine. It was the error of his behavior. If Red Smith wasted time prodding his followers for their weaknesses, there would be no rebellion. The cruelest rebellions were fought with men of all stripes, from poor to rich and from young to old. Bram Beekman held fears, unseen to Red and others, but visible through his eyes. Fears, of which Red Smith held few, could have been found in his deceased brother. His brother had been an instigator for the rebellion, but no more a revolutionary than a security guard at the stripclub is a prostitute. Loyalty, he recalled then, was the reasoning of Donovan's fears, of which his was divided, and Red's was full. The two brothers were opposite faces on the same coin, for if both had the same foundation of rebellion, each had differing prospects for the rebellion to live up to. Loyalties, they said, loyalties were the nuts and bolts of the rebellion, the stability of the shoe which it wore. One wanted this and one wanted that. The loyalists themselves were scarce, but not was the revolutionary spirit, visible in the Smith family. The rebellion was the smoke and the revolution was the fire, for in between meant the existence of a spark. Red Smith, eyes devoted to the new sky blossoming, recognized the three stages of revolt. To the corruption, first came the idea of rebellion. To the doubtors, second was the act of violent revolution. To the disillusioned, third was the establishment of the new and the promise of the future. Smith was aware that no true follower of the reds had ever witnessed the third stage of revolution. To Red Smith, the idea was that his revolution would inspire others to revolt, whereas the brother Donovan would have become disillusioned soonafter. No matter the blood nor the guts, Donovan had split loyalty between the nation and the cause. It was the greatest problem to the question of the rebellion's survival. For the revolution to succeed into stage three, there would remain no dissenters. "Welcome," said Drake to Bram, his tone of voice threatening. Bram pursed his lips, folded his arms to his chest, nodded once. "I finished with Jameson for now," he began, "he reeks. I opened the mouth; the tongue was a dark red. I examined for a quick second his arm, well, the rash has spread to his chest and shoulders." Red Smith turned to meet his eyes. "Post mortem?" "Post mortem." "Is he contagious, you think?" "Contagious?" "To the touch, through any proximity with the corpse?" "We'll have to burn the body," quipped Drake. "Later today, perhaps now." "That's nonsense," Bram barked. "The tests on Carter Jameson have yet to be undertaken." "How long will they last?" Bram looked away. "The rash, the course of the infection, the impact on the brain and the organs will take weeks. I plan to take samples, save them for later, and call it a day." Red Smith deeply smiled. He stood upright, chest out and neck straight. A flicker in his face, nose thick, and cheeks bent. He was a man of a hard constitution, a body stiffened with decades of hurt. Red blamed the hurt on the heart and the heart on the hurt. As a teenager, he had been a devil. The scars on his neck and chest which refused to fall off proved him a street fighter. In his youth, fighting in the street of this town and nearby towns were made a living. One day, the sun had been too hot and Red split his nose down the middle during a street fight when the challenger pulled a wooden plank from the ground. Sitting drunk at a game of poker, he despised cheating. With the broken nose, Red despised cheating. Being questioned in a police station over being against the Man, Red despised cheating, for under his armpit was a scar received from the interrogation. Red smiled now with more affection. Affection, for that day had held to be true. Although he had lost the date, Red remembered exactly the day with the wind as a quiet breeze, the nature as clouds hung thin, the birds chirping. His father Whittaker had come home with a back ache, complaining that his cigars were loose and cheap, and that he desired a break. That the people over in the fields had woken up on the wrong side of the bed. It was early afternoon when he took breaks from a day of labor. Then he would leave as the sun cooled and return for dinner and a smoke on the porch. It was early afternoon, that day, when the red father made a long phone call in his study. As the sun drew on, Red watched as, within the hour, a group of men arrived at his home's porch for his father. They loved and admired his father, a true laborer of the cause. For hours and hours, every once in a couple of days, the men would arrive to discuss this policy and that policy, this wife and that wife, this marriage and that alimony. The men honored his father's speeches, and a handful of them came more frequently than most. One time, one of the men argued against Whittaker's peaceful aggression, calling it too democratic. Whittaker respected his revolutionary spirit, and Red noticed the bold look on the man's face. He came the next day with pistol in hand, asking for Whittaker's hand in revolution, for which, as Red watched from the porch, his father sternly refuse. The man had grown disillusioned and pleaded. "There are good revolutionaries and bad revolutionaries," he had said. "You romanticize revolution." Day became night and the night became morning; his father's disillusioned follower was soon arrested on suspicion. "The town is ready," Red said abruptly. The three men silently watched their leader. Bram chuckled. "The revolution?" "It began the moment we committed the first murders." "The people?" "They have grown alongside us for too long," said Red Smith. "They understand the revolution. It is something deep within their hearts that, over time, has blossomed and matured until the correct moment." "Now," declared Bram. "The Band has done its worth." Red Smith raised a clenched fist to his chest. The three men did follow in suit with clenched fists. The man whom they admired as Rockefeller, with a flicker of strength in his eyes, raised his fist to the side of his forehead and clenched it further, for the undead were alive and the revolutionary smoke had become fire. Distinguished with unmistakable glee, Red Smith smiled with dark laughter in his gullet, for he had taken the road less traveled by, of which his father had refused to accept as a route home. With the face of an arsonist lighting a fire, with no regrets on his constitution, Red Smith and the three men raised their clenched fists into the air. "For me," said the man Rockefeller. "For the bringer of dawn lives," Bram said. "And shall." "And he will." The room hung heavy with stillness. At thirty past five in the morning, the rule of Rockefeller had grown thicker, for the revolution was no longer a purge of infidels to the cause, a band of hired assassins under the moon to do his dirty work, cracking a few eggs to make the omelette. Now with the omelette of the revolution in his grasp, condemned as the bringer of dawn, Red Smith had fulfilled his dream, for which others would see as their nightmare. The revolution would continue, for blood had been drawn on his family tree. He loved revolution. He loved his followers. And, he loved himself. Red Smith loved Rockefeller. Loved himself. With a widened smile on his face, Red Smith stood firm until an explosive gunshot rang out in the funeral home. ---- The tomb of Carter Jameson. Outside. The morning sun had risen to the new day. The streets of the town are cold and undisturbed. As a revolution was brewing nearby, outside a decayed building walked a weary-faced man with an awful limp. The man is a foreigner to the land of killers, for a look of innocence crossed his face. A fat revolver trembled in his hands as fear swelled in his throat. He was mumbling a prayer, to his saints, to his loved ones, for those passed, never for himself. Lyle Jackson, sleepless and restless with untamed anger, would not pray for his soul. It was not of necessity, as he reached the end of sidewalk which met the building's entrance, had a mad bone to pick with the devils of this town. A town, Lyle thought, for he no longer considered it a town. Wounded gravely, injured within and out, he entered on the sidewalk and stopped at the walkway entrance. Refusing to continue, grasping his belly, Lyle found himself under a clothed roof which covered the passageway into the funeral home. Now shivering from the cold, teeth chattering in between pain and frustration, his fingers tightened around the fat revolver, vengeance brewing throughout his heart and soul. To the new morning, he toasted with a warm smile on his wrinkled face. Lyle Jackson, once a man of admiration and thought, now began to walk down the passageway. With prayer on his tongue, Lyle momentarily remembered about the other two men. For the day was young, and the night was old, he refused to pay attention to the fates of his friend and his friendly foe, nor to the fates of the young soldiers. With revenge brewing, his heart burning hot, Lyle cared not for the affairs of the sergeant who had allowed for his public humiliation, threatened his life, and vice versa. He cared about getting in, getting out, and escaping the madhouse. But where to, Lyle had no destination. He hid the revolver to his thigh. He would not need permission to enter the building. A man sat at a wooden chair next to the door, his face unseen under his drooped baseball hat. To his side stood a woman, full-chested and long-haired, in a sort of uniform. Guards, and if you guessed right, soldiers of the Band. "Let me pass," muttered Lyle. "What are you doing here?" "I'm here to pay a visit." "To who?" "A friend." "Name?" "Rockefeller," Lyle told the woman. "The man called Rockefeller." "Are you with the Band?" "I'm too old for that." "Who are you?" Lyle refused to respond. Hurt, he thought, he was hurt. Born in Indiana, raised a Jackson, always a Jackson. The night had been heavy for him. He stood several feet from the guards. "I am what I am," he said. "And alone, I am." "You're not from around here." "Rockefeller, I want to see him," Lyle plainly said. He had bare breath in his lungs, his blood boiling. "I want to see Rockefeller." "I know who you are." "I am alone." "You're the one they're looking for," said the lady, to her own shock and disbelief as the other guard, half awake, rose from his slumber, looking up from his chair. "Alone," said Lyle. "I'm alone and hurt." "A killer, one of the killers," said the lady. "Killer!" she shouted. A look of rich disgust filled the woman's face, her mouth chewing ravishingly through her frustration, her voice fluttering with instant rage. "Alone and hurt, that's me." He began to walk towards the entrance door. "You're him!" Lyle, watching and waiting, continued walking until he halted at the entrance door. Beyond his senses, and out of his wits, Lyle Jackson had waited a long time for the guard to unceremoniously unholster a gun of her own, aim it toward his chest and fire several times, and now he accepted that the lady was not armed. The guards were not armed. And, if by luck, this meant that any other guard, whether asleep or alert, would not have a six-shooter such as his, a new fat revolver. None of the guards would be threats. "I'm armed," said Lyle. "And I'm going to enter this building." The woman stood her ground. Lyle stood himself straight, gently raising his back and brushing his face with the revolver. Controlled by his sole mission of thirst for vengeance, Lyle locked eyes with the lady as her eyes filled with ill-hidden terror. The revolver controlled hearts and minds, but not his. Lyle controlled the revolver. And as he climbed the doorsteps, put his hand on the door handle, with the guard watching as the front door creaked open, he was now who controlled the funeral home. With the bull of fright in her heart, the lady officer yelled her bloodcurdling scream. He rolled his eyes and weakly smiled, teeth pretty. "You're—''you're Lyle Jackson''—''!" Lyle Jackson made a mad dash into funeral home. The guards rushed after him. The lady grabbed him by the shoulder and he slipped free. When Lyle entered the funeral home, a red hot pain surged throughout his sides. He was breathing heavily. Turned around. Turned forward and found himself in the lobby of the funeral home. The lobby was a wide waiting room with a receptionist's desk at the end. Turned backwards. The two guards. ''Shot the hell out of me, Lyle thought to himself. The two guards moved closer. Lyle moved and took a step backwards. "Hands up!" A voice pleaded ''from behind him. "—Or what?" "Go to hell, man," said the person behind him. "With one pull of the trigger, I can send you on a one-way trip to the devil's shithole." "Listen to what he says," the lady guard said. "I want Rockefeller." "He'll kill you if you don't surrender." "I'll kill you," the voice said. "No," responded Lyle. "I'll kill you, each of you." The three guards chuckled. "I want Rockefeller." Three chuckles. "I want Rockefeller's ''bird-shitting ''ass, now." Three more chuckles. Pain, hot pain swelled in Lyle's chest. ''Shot the hell out of me. A tumor of fear bulged in his throat and Lyle swallowed it down. A bullet in his lungs. A blind mission on mind. Hatred in his eyes and revenge in his heart. A fat revolver in his hands. Sweat rolling down his face. A twitch in his face as he faced the two guards. A snarling growl out of his mouth. Lyle pointed the gun at the guards and bliss came upon him. A hand took hold of his shoulder from the back and the revolver went off, putting a hole into the nearest guard. The sound was deafening in the enclosed space of the lobby. The recoil of the gun jolted the life right out of him. A sense of shock and fear pierced his heart as the humanity paled from his face. He would be all right. That was his last thought. An explosion of pain in his mouth as the surviving guard punched him in the face. The straw fedora flew off into the air. He started to walk sideways, staggered, crumbled on a weak knee, and collapsed onto his back with eyes open. Hot blood leaked from his nostrils and his nose was forced out of place. The hot pain in his sides had fattened and he was seeing stars as he attempted to stand up, falling upon a knee, body trembling with pain and sweat, with no idea of what was coming. "No pleasure!" shouted the voice. "I take no pleasure in this, none at all!" The shadow of a man passed forth. Lyle's vision, once that of youth, had become fogged with numbness. A saying once said that the deer never sees what hits him. Unprepared for the next hit, Lyle was knocked off his balance by the hard blow of an aluminum bat and was strewn on the floor with limbs splayed in every which way. "Good God," the surviving guard weakly whispered. "Amen to that," the other man said. "He's the last one, ain't he?" "The last one." "The last one left," said the guard, and Lyle couldn't make out if it was the lady or not. He hoped he had shot them good. Shot them good. Shot the hell outta me. Hands. Lyle felt their hands on him. They were going to pick him up. Blood and alcohol, he tasted blood and alcohol. "I beat the living dumbass out of him, didn't I?" "Yessir." "I fixed his attitude, didn't I?" "Yessir." "And I deserve ''whatever reward comes with the price on his head," said the man. A moment of silence. "Call the band; we got an officer wounded." All of a sudden, Lyle began screaming and kicking. "''I shot—!" "Call the band," said the man with the baseball bat. "Goddamit, call the band." "Don't hurt me." "I take no pleasure in this," said the man as he let go of Lyle; the other guard had Lyle standing upright with his arms locked behind his back. "He's gon' hit you again," said the guard. "Don't, don't," whined Lyle. The man came into Lyle's full sight; ugly and face filled with ash and grime. Dark-skinned like a hog and his eyes filled with harsh victory. A young man, for Lyle had seen him once too many times. It was the nephew, the son of the fallen brother of the bringer of dawn, of Rockefeller, the nephew of Red Smith. The inherent evil. Cleon Smith held the baseball bat at an angle and aimed it for Lyle. Killer of the monster Carter Jameson and murderer of a true friend, Dennis. "No more!" cried Lyle. His eyes had grown huge with great fear. "Don't do it, don't hurt me!" "We'll treat you right here in this new town of ours," Cleon said, and struck him on the head with a thundering blow from the aluminum bat. Lyle didn't know that he was being held by a wall, but the guard let go of him, and the blow knocked him against the wall. The back of his head smacked the wall. Dazed, Cleon slapped him across the face. "No more!" "I don't know what we saw in you at first," said the nephew. "You and your friend." "My friends," said Lyle. "Dead and dying," said the guard. Cleon angrily spoke and raised the bat. "Who the hell are your friends?" Lyle remained silent. The guard chuckled. He heard another chuckle nearby, a chuckle from the guard who he'd shot. Eyes on Cleon. The nephew gave a hearty chuckle. Three chuckles. Lyle had lost his touch on reality. His head was full of fruitless thoughts, each less and less, more and more with pain and fatter pain. "You'd said that you would kill each of us," said Cleon, his voice restrained with hilarious laughter. Lyle nodded. "Look at him," said a guard. "Look at him now!" "You only know death," Cleon said. "I will show you life." "A better life," said the guard. "I will show you the new order," Cleon said, and squinted one eye and adjusted his grip on the bloody black baton. "The undead have risen, and the bringer of dawn is with us." "He is upon us," said the guard. Just then, a door nearby opened up and a group of four middle-aged men stormed into the waiting room. From the entrance door, a group of armed individuals flooded in like a locust swarm. All the individuals formed into two lines and watched. One man stood bright among them all. One of the four middle-aged men. It was''—'' "No more!" "Give him more," said Red Smith. "Give that bitch more." "I will," Cleon spoke. "For my father." "And for me." "For you, the king. The bringer of dawn." "Our dear leader!" shouted everyone. The last thing that Lyle saw was the baseball bat as it struck him across the head, cracking his cheekbone, splitting his vision into bloody red dots, and then he blacked out. Blood and alcohol. "You did fine, son," Red spoke. "You put him down good." "Unlike the other one." "Does it really matter?" "I have no idea what you saw in him and Nolan." "Cleon," said Red, teeth mildly gritted, but not enough to be visible. "The Feds are taken care of and this dirty laundry of ours is as well. And we got rid of that shit-eating father of yours." Cleon glared him closely. The armed henchmen around them watched closely. "My father," said Cleon, "is dead." Red Smith smiled. "Dead." "I loved him," Cleon said weakly. "The cause's worth far greater, son," Red said. "He loved the cause, too. Your father." "He did." "But less than you and me." "An enemy of the cause," spoke Cleon. "Was he not?" "A real shit-eater." Cleon nodded. Red Smith smiled. There was a fearsome presence about him. "The most poisonous people, you know, come disguised as family and loved ones." Another nod from Cleon. "We killed so many birds tonight with one stone," Red Smith said, and his henchmen barked in earnest agreement. He turned and looked at them. Dozens of pale, sweaty and terrified faces on men and young boys with wooden battle rifles. One of them, a young man of no more than twenty summers and winters, looked at Red and stared wildly. Red eyeballed him a long while. "You eat shit, son?" "I eat that shit up, sir." "Good answer." "Praise be to the bringer of dawn," said the young man. "Hello!" Red snarled. "Who's that, goddammit?" "It's a man with his family," Cleon said. Red Smith faced the door and, lo and behold, behind his henchmen was a man in working pants and a white shirt with a shorter lady and a young girl at their side. "Rockefeller, oh, Rockefeller," the man with the family crowed in anguish. "What is happening?" "The night had been saved and the day has been seized," spoke Red Smith. "How are you and your family?" "Oh, gee, it's awful," said the man. "The girl can't sleep and the wife can't either. Too many loud bangs in the streets. A neighbor of mine says it was the guard, the soldiers from earlier today. Maybe he was on to something, I don't know. You know, Rockefeller?" "It was the monsters," said the wife. "I'm telling you, it was those monsters." "I done told you already," the man said. "It weren't no monsters. Must have been those soldiers, like the ones here before, right? Rockefeller, right?" A moment of silence. "Right," quipped the shit-eater of a young man. Cleon growled at him. "Quiet, and let my uncle talk his way." Talk his way. "Rockefeller, tell me," pleaded the man. "Was it the soldiers?" Red Smith smiled that warm smile with the sting of a snake and the art of a politician. "The threat has been eradicated." "The monsters," spoke the wife. "So was it the monsters?" "Or the soldiers?" "The threat has been eradicated," Red Smith assured them. "And peace has been reinstated as it was." "Oh, Rockefeller," said the man, walking past the henchmen and throwing his arms onto the mayor's round body. "You done did it again''—you saved my family''." "I did, friend." Red Smith smiled and tolerated the hug. "I saved your family." "Oh, thank you Rockefeller!" shouted the wife. "I assume you three will attend tomorrow's gathering?" "We will," she said. "A gathering of what?" The husband said. "A gathering of the town," said Red. "To celebrate the capture of the criminals and bandits." "Just like the last one!" "Yes, my man," snarled Red. "Just like the last one, only better." ---- =Issues= Category:Step by Step Category:Category:Step by Step Issues Category:Issues